This may shock so many people reading this but apparently the Obama administration has been lying about those now infamous talking points used by UN Ambassador Susan Rice to talk about the Benghazi terror attack on Sunday a.m. news shows.

Jonathan Karl of ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.

While we were told that the State Department had no substantive input on the talking points:

take our poll - story continues below

Should Jim Acosta have gotten his press pass back?

Should Jim Acosta have gotten his press pass back?

Should Jim Acosta have gotten his press pass back?*

Yes, he should have gotten it back.

No, you can't act like a child and keep your pass.

Maybe? I'm not sure if he should have.

Email*

Phone

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Completing this poll grants you access to The Lid updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to this site's Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department. The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.

MMM…Things be rotten in the District of Columbia (apologies to Shakespeare). Karl’s discoverydirectly contradicts what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about the talking points in November.

“Those talking points originated from the intelligence community. They reflect the IC’s best assessments of what they thought had happened,” Carney told reporters at the White House press briefing on November 28, 2012. “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.”

Summaries of White House and State Department emails — some of which were first published by Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard — show that the State Department had extensive input into the editing of the talking points

For example, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland raised objections to this paragraph drafted by the CIA in an early version of the talking points:

“The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al-Qa’ida in Benghazi and eastern Libya. These noted that, since April, there have been at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy. We cannot rule out the individuals has previously surveilled the U.S. facilities, also contributing to the efficacy of the attacks.”

In an email to officials at the White House and the intelligence agencies, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland took issue with including that information because it “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either? Concerned …”The paragraph was entirely deleted.

Nuland also objected to naming the terrorist groups involved in the attack because “we don’t want to prejudice the investigation.” The FBI who was conducting the investigation had no objection to the terrorists being named.

“These changes don’t resolve all of my issues or those of my buildings leadership,” Nuland wrote. In an email dated 9/14/12 at 9:34 p.m. — three days after the attack and two days before Ambassador Rice appeared on the Sunday shows – Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes wrote an email saying the State Department’s concerns needed to be addressed.

“We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation. We thus will work through the talking points tomorrow morning at the Deputies Committee meeting.”After that meeting, which took place Saturday morning at the White House, the CIA drafted the final version of the talking points – deleting all references to al Qaeda and to the security warnings in Benghazi prior to the attack.

What is not clear from the ABC report is who added the part about the YouTube video and why it was added. But nevertheless this revelation will justify additional investigation. It’s time we were given the truth about what happened in Benghazi on 9/11/12.

Become a Lid insider!

Sign up for our free email newsletter, and we'll make sure to keep you in the loop.

Join the conversation!

We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, profanity, vulgarity, doxing, or discourteous behavior. If a comment is spam, instead of replying to it please hover over that comment, click the ∨ icon, and mark it as spam. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain fruitful conversation.